Grim Sleeper

• 1. Introduction

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  Lonnie David Franklin Jr., known as the Grim Sleeper, was responsible for at least ten murders and one attempted murder in Los Angeles between 1984 and 2007. His nickname came from an absence. Between 1988 and 2002, investigators saw no sign of him at all, a quiet stretch of fourteen years.

  For much of that time, police had a pattern but no name. The pattern was a single firearm, a handful of alleys, and women whose deaths had received little public attention.

  This documentary asks how a man could be linked by ballistics in the 1980s and still go unidentified for decades. It asks what stood between the evidence and an arrest. And it asks what the objects found in his home might mean for women who were never counted.

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• 2. The Southside Slayer

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  In September 1985, the Los Angeles Police Department stood before the press and described a killer who had been stabbing and strangling women in South Central. They called him the Southside Slayer. Detectives believed he was responsible for at least 13 sex workers killed between 1983 and late 1985. Some people used a grimmer label, the Strawberry Murders, after slang for a woman who trades sex for drugs.

  The press conference set off anger rather than relief. Critics said the department had waited far too long to warn the South Central community. Activist Margaret Prescod and others protested weekly outside police headquarters, demanding a task force. Prescod pointed to the attention given to Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, who hunted women in wealthier areas between June 1984 and August 1985. She accused the department of indifference toward women who were poor, Black, drug users and sex workers. The LAPD denied it.

  By January 1986-15 murders had been linked to the case, and more detectives joined a combined LAPD and sheriff's department effort known as the Southside Slayer Task Force. Prescod's group became the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders. In March 1986 it pressured the Los Angeles City Council to raise the reward for information from $10,000 to $25,000.

  Then the theory began to fall apart. By late 1986, the methods and suspect descriptions no longer matched, and investigators suspected that four or more killers were at work. The task force began shrinking in 1987. In December of that year its commander, Lieutenant John Zorn, told the Los Angeles Times that "the flow of clues is almost non-existent at this point."

  Years later, other men were tied to some of the deaths. Louis Craine was found to have committed at least two of the murders. Michael Hughes, Daniel Lee Siebert, Chester Turner and Ivan Hill each committed at least one. Some deaths may have been the work of pimps or clients with no connection to any serial killer. But one cluster of killings still belonged to nobody.

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• 3. One Gun

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  Debra Jackson, 29, was found on the 10th of August 1985 in an alley near West Gage Avenue. She had been shot three times in the chest. Her case became the first known entry in a series that forensic examiners tied together through a .25 caliber firearm.

  The link grew in August 1986, when firearm examination connected Jackson's murder to that of Henrietta Wright, 35. Wright was found under a discarded mattress in an alley on West Vernon Avenue, and she may have been killed elsewhere. Two days after Wright was found, 36-year-old Thomas Sylvester Steele was found dead at 71st Street and Halldale Avenue. He was a Black man, and he was never charged in connection with the case. Police suggested he may have been a friend of another victim, or that he had discovered what was happening.

  By 1987, seven victims were tied to the same gun. Every one had been shot in the chest at close range. Their bodies turned up outdoors, and in the cases of Bernita Sparks and Mary Katherine Lowe, in a trash bin and an alley, covered after the shooting.

  Late 1988 brought a detour. Three women, Judith Simpson, Cynthia Walker and Latanya Johnson, were killed with a 9mm pistol, and the task force investigated those cases too. Sheriff's Detective Rickey Ross was arrested after he was found with drugs and a sex worker in a vehicle. A rusted 9mm Beretta was in the trunk. The LAPD linked his gun to the bullets, and Ross was charged. Then an independent forensic analysis found it unlikely that his gun was the weapon, and he was released. All three murders remain unsolved.

  On the 20th of November 1988, Enietra Washington, 30, accepted a ride in Gramercy Park. The driver turned into an alley, shot her, and left her for dead. She survived, and two decades later her memory of that night would become one of the case's most important descriptions.

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• 4. Before Los Angeles

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  The earliest known violence in Franklin's life took place in April 1974 in Stuttgart, West Germany. He grew up in South Central Los Angeles, married, had two children, and served in the United States Army. In Stuttgart, he and two other servicemen, who had already tried to kidnap another woman that night, stopped a 17-year-old girl and asked for directions. They offered her a ride home.

  When she accepted, they held a knife to her throat, drove to a field, and raped her through the night. The men took photographs while they did it, a habit Franklin would later repeat with women in Los Angeles. The girl managed to feign interest in Franklin and asked for his phone number. That number let police identify him.

  A West German court sentenced Franklin to three years and four months in prison. After his release, he received a dishonorable discharge from the Army in July 1975. The girl he attacked, by then an adult, returned to testify at the sentencing phase of his 2016 capital murder trial.

  Back in California, the record continued in smaller entries. In 1989, Franklin was convicted of two theft charges, a misdemeanor assault and a battery. He served time for only one of the thefts.

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• 5. A Silent City

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  In May 2007, the death of 25-year-old Janecia Peters changed the case. DNA analysis linked her killing to at least 11 unsolved murders in Los Angeles, the first of which dated to 1985. That same year, the LAPD quietly formed the 800 Task Force. Six detectives were assigned, under the Robbery-Homicide Unit.

  The public learned of it from a newspaper. After a four-month investigation, LA Weekly reporter Christine Pelisek revealed the task force, the DNA link to Peters' murder, and the silence of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief William Joseph Bratton. Neither had issued a press release or warned the community. In some cases, the newspaper was the first to tell families that their daughters had long been confirmed as victims of a serial killer.

  Pressure built over the next two years. In early September 2008, officials announced a $500,000 reward. On the 1st of November, the case appeared on the Fox program America's Most Wanted. On the 25th of February 2009, Bratton addressed the press about the case for the first time. The police formally adopted the nickname LA Weekly had chosen, the Grim Sleeper.

  Bratton also played a 9-1-1 call from the 1980s. In it, a man reported seeing a body being dumped and gave a detailed description of a van, along with its license plate. The van was connected to the now-closed Cosmopolitan Church.

  In March 2009, Pelisek interviewed Enietra Washington at length. She remembered a man who "looked neat. Tidy. Kind of geeky." He wore a black polo shirt tucked into khaki trousers. She also described both the inside and the outside of his vehicle, details that detectives would later be able to test against a suspect.

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• 6. The Missing Sample

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  A law passed in 2004 should have caught Franklin years earlier. Voters approved Proposition 69, which requires DNA collection from all felons and from people arrested on certain charges, and which expanded the state's DNA database. Franklin was convicted of a felony in 2003 and was on probation for three years.

  His sample was supposed to enter the database. It did not. Between November 2004 and August 2005, probation officers were not collecting samples from some people on probation, and the department lacked the resources to begin until August 2005. Authorities went on to process thousands of samples, but not his.

  The breakthrough came sideways. Police had found no exact match for the crime scene DNA anywhere in California's database. So they searched for profiles similar enough to suggest a family relationship. That search turned up Franklin's son, Christopher, who had been convicted of a felony weapons charge in 2008. Christopher was too young to have committed the murders, but the match pointed investigators toward his father, Lonnie.

  Then came a quieter kind of detective work. An undercover officer posed as a waiter at a restaurant where Franklin ate, and collected dishes, silverware, glasses and pizza crusts. A piece of discarded pizza was compared with saliva found on the victims, and detectives established a match.

  Franklin was arrested on the 7th of July 2010. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office charged him with ten counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, along with a special circumstance allegation of multiple murders. What officers found inside his home would widen the investigation far beyond those counts.

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• 7. Photographs and Open Questions

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  On the 16th of December 2010, the LAPD released 180 photographs of women found in Franklin's home. Detectives had been unable to identify them. "These people are not suspects, we don't even know if they are victims," Police Chief Charlie Beck said. He described Franklin's "reign of terror in the city of Los Angeles, which spanned well over two decades."

  The full collection was larger. Investigators found over 1,000 photos and several hundred hours of video. The images mostly showed Black women, from teenagers to older women, often nude, some conscious and some unconscious. Police believed Franklin took many of the pictures, which dated back thirty years.

  On the 3rd of November 2011, Reuters reported that police were considering Franklin as a suspect in six more killings. Two were being examined as possible victims during the long lull. Of the other four, two bodies had been found in the 1980s, and two women were reported missing in 2005, with the remains of those two never found. Detectives said they reviewed hundreds of old case files while seeking help identifying the photographs.

  Some questions reached beyond Los Angeles. Law enforcement suggested Franklin might be a suspect in the abduction, rape and murder of five girls in Belize City between 1998 and 2000. His wife, Sylvia Castillo, was from Belize. A victim's aunt allegedly saw him there, and a van used in one of his proven killings was later found in Belize. He was never charged.

  Other cases stayed unresolved. In the fall of 1993, Fredia Gibbs, a martial artist and basketball player, was attacked in Inglewood after Franklin spiked her drinks at a domino party and offered her a ride in his van. She fought him off. Edwinta Hereford, 19, was found on the 105 Freeway on the 16th of May 2010 after being pushed from a speeding car. The lead investigator said they had not ruled her case in or out. Relatives of four missing women also believe Franklin was involved: Cathern Davis, last seen in 1982, Rosalind Giles in 1991, Lisa Renee Knox in 1993 and Anita Yolanda Parker in 1998.

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• 8. Trial and Verdict

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  The trial opened on the 16th of February 2016, after lengthy pretrial discovery and several delays. Franklin was held without bail. Closing arguments began on the 2nd of May, and jurors started deliberating two days later. After nearly three months of trial and a day and a half of deliberation, the jury convicted him of all counts on the 5th of May.

  The sentencing hearing opened a week later. Prosecutors presented evidence about four more women they believed Franklin had killed. Sharon Alicia Dismuke, whose body was found in January 1984, had not been counted among the Grim Sleeper victims until after his arrest. Inez Warren, who died after being shot in 1988, was identified only after his arrest as well. Rolenia Morris was last seen in September 2005. Her Nevada driver's license and two sexually explicit photographs of her were found in his garage, and her body has never been found. Prosecutors chose not to charge these deaths, fearing further delay.

  Princess Cheyanne Berthomieux was 15 when she died. She was found strangled and beaten in an Inglewood alley in March 2002, the youngest of the named victims. On the 6th of June 2016, the jury returned a death verdict. On the 10th of August, the Los Angeles Superior Court sentenced Franklin to death on each of ten counts, naming the victims one by one.

  On the 28th of March 2020, Franklin was found dead in his cell at San Quentin State Prison. His body showed no signs of trauma. His cause of death and autopsy results have never been publicly released.

  The case has since been retold on screen and in print. Filmmaker Nick Broomfield made the documentary Tales of the Grim Sleeper in 2014. Christine Pelisek, the reporter who broke the story, published her account in 2017. In 2024, Tubi released Evil Among Us: The Grim Sleeper, directed by Victoria Drew and including reenactments.

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